Technical Field
The present invention relates to network communications and, more particularly, to wireless cross-connect switches for network clusters and data centers.
Description of the Related Art
Data centers show increased usage of large-bandwidth communication systems due to heightened server and storage consolidation, increased virtualization of system resources, and the design of multi-core processor and multi-processor systems. The demand for interconnection performance increases proportionally with processor performance, as faster processors need correspondingly faster input/output connections. However, interconnection technology scales at a much slower rate than processor speed, resulting in an interconnect bottleneck. Conventionally this is solved by increasing the number of communication links, but such a solution causes problems of its own in data center management, as the number of cables for wired connections can rapidly become unmanageable.
In wired data centers, each server rack is connected to a network fabric of aggregation switches and core routers. There may be dozens of cables between each rack and the switch/router fabric. The core router may have hundreds or thousands of ports and is generally not reconfigurable. In addition, such core routers are often expensive and power hungry. The hundreds of cables passing to this single machine may impair data center cooling and occupy a substantial amount of space and data center infrastructure. While cables can be run along a drop ceiling to conserve space, the weight of the cabling often requires structural reinforcement to prevent the data center's ceiling from collapsing.
The problem is even more pronounced in all-to-all clusters. Some applications work best on clusters where every node is directly connected to all other nodes. In an exemplary cluster having 32 nodes, where each node needs to connect to 31 others, a total of 496 cables are needed. In a cluster of 128 processors, 8128 cables are needed. This places a large burden on the data support, logistically, economically, and structurally.